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LorenaMontana

The state of Epic

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I have to say I just hope that Epic doesn't become good enough to damage Freedom population. Sorry.

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Just now, zigozag said:

I have to say I just hope that Epic doesn't become good enough to damage Freedom population. Sorry.

 

I don't recal it damaging Freedom population when it was good, the first year or two population was high on most Epic servers, as it was on Freedom.

 

The ability to portal between the two may hae helped that of course, but my Epic character began on Exodus, before joining Epic at the start, while I continued to play my main on Freedom.

 

I think the hope is that changes to EPic will bring back some of those who have left Epic, and Wurm completely, rather than siphon off the freedom playerbase to bolster Epic's population lows. At least I hope that's the thinking....

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Bleeding out is the core issue that chaos and epic has, and both have always had for as long as I've played.  Freedom has it too but much harder to notice when your servers aren't bordering on 5-10 players average.  We can argue day and night what is best to keep current players interested, but no matter how good it is, people will move on wherever for whatever reason, perpetual bleed out. 

 

As much as I desire to see both chaos and epic thrive (I always considered them to be drastically different playstyles, though it has changed some) with interest and changes and new features, it's obvious to me the core issue that Wurm has as a whole is population growth.  Rhetorical questions:  How many people last more than a week or a few days?  How many people make it off the tutorial?  This is a huge focus of Budda's and while it may mean WE get to feel "ignored", if we continue to ignore this problem then "we" becomes a couple of "me" though in some cases that is already accurate.  Truth is, changes may make some of us happy, we may enjoy some new content, but no flashy change or bug fixes will fix epic, or chaos, or wurm.  The issue is population, and in my eyes fixing the population fixes wurm.  Of course, not population alone, there will be continued bug fixes and new content either way as is happening currently and this acts as a boost to help maintain a growing population. 

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Find a way to merge epic toons away from curve and onto freedom/chaos.

 

Delete epic and we are at least on the way to something.

 

Shouldnt be to hard to find a way to fix the skills and some tomes etc. then we are good.

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Just now, Lundu said:

Find a way to merge epic toons away from curve and onto freedom/chaos.

 

Delete epic and we are at least on the way to something.

 

Shouldnt be to hard to find a way to fix the skills and some tomes etc. then we are good.

 

As far as it goes, a simple skills transfer would be easy enough, since the effective skill curve is derived from the numerical skill of the player anyway, and only on Epic server, move the character to a freedom server and effective skill does not apply anyway, just the base numeric skill of the character.

 

The effective skill curve is not an issue, it only applies on epic servers anyway, if the reverse were true, and an average freedom player were to be given a 1:1 skill transfer to Epic their effective skill levels would be boosted the same way every other player on Epic is.

 

For instance, if my digging skill were 60, my effective skill would be about 80, on epic, on freedom it would be 60.If you look at your skills on Epic it shows your numeric level, with your effective skill in brackets, it's a mechanism applied by the server settings, it has no actual effect on skills, other than to actually slow down skillgain in some circumstances

 

My preferred solution would be to simply switch the home servers to Freedom settings, and set them aside as a seperate cluster, similar to the way Pristine and Release were initially, with a view of opening connections to the rest of Freedom after time had passed and the servers were more settled, this has the advantage of allowing deeds to remain as they are initially, with less need for compensaton for deeds and items, because after all this time some people have hoarded a lot of stuff. 

 

It was certainly possible to do that when Wild became Chaos initially, since it was reopened for a time as a Freedom server, before reverting to PvP, I see no technical barrier to doing the same with the home servers at least, single kingdom servers are relatively easy to switch to freedom, it's just things like guard towers that present any issues, and those issues were worked on and fixed on during the Wild/Chaos hiatus.

 

It's more a question of should it be done, rather than can it be done, because it certainly can be done, it's been done before.

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Have you considered making home servers pve and keep elevation as pvp? would sure get a poulation boost on home servers then and with the epic curve skilling folks up fast, people might then be tempted to try pvp?

Edited by VenerableDog
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Yeah nah.

 

Merge or broke.

 

We already have a pvp and pve servers on the same cluster and it just allows people to keep valuables safe without fear of losing it. Granted the same can be achieved with alts already.

 

Merging the more pvp active Chaos server to epic won't help the situation due to the sheer amount of people who use the freedom servers as a second home/hunting ground. If that happened I'd likely sell most of my freedom assets because I am a lot more active in pvp than freedom. Merging the epic cluster to freedom/chaos will bring back players and accounts left sitting to rot in the dust.

 

There'll probably be those that won't want to lose hard work on the home servers so keep those around as freedom servers. A good portion of the elevation player base has been wanting a new map for quite some time now so just piss that off completely and give all of us pvpers a new pvp map on the freedom cluster so we all start on even footing.

Edited by Rudie
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I was thinking of the OP after reading a bit, It must kill you some LorenaMontana for I know how much you love wurm, and protector of epic and BL.  I've talked to you several times and I know you want it to thrive and be healthy and that is your end goal with the post.  To that end sorry for my posts as they have more of a doom analysis yet i can only comment as i see it and hear others.  One drink up to you on the bar as the ardent defender and guardian..maybe sole guardian.  Just don't fall off the stool this time and break your arm... cause that never happened to you before.;)

Edited by Bloodscythe
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BEFORE I make my point,  I would like to say that I have played on Epic and, like Lorena, still log in over there occasionally. I played there for about a year in the early days.

It was fun, the PVP was fast, and the community was growing in strength. Not soon after, though, the warning signs began to appear. Players not logging in, premium subscriptions on the wane, so at the time the developers decided to take action. Things improved for a while, but the death knell was already being readied.

As with Wild, too many decisions were made which massively impacted gameplay for all the wrong reasons. One kingdom or other was favoured.

This approach does not work. It is impossible to please everyone. It only serves to create dissatisfaction.

The last time I logged in, on Affliction, on a Saturday afternoon, there were 13 on the entire cluster. Thirteen.

 

My point is, quite simply, that Epic was  badly thought out, a plan poorly executed.

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13 on affliction you say, that tells me how long ago you logged in there. You must have been on the back tail of the statistical curve after affliction remake and the wave of tourist left.

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No, not 13 on Affliction. 13 on the entire Epic cluster. I was the only person on Affliction.

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Something big needs to be done to revert the dead of epic. It saddens me so much :(

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Shut it down or reduce upkeep. With epic in the state it is in it is a crime to charge people full upkeep.

All we are doing now it trying to wait it out hoping you will fix epic.

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On 7/15/2017 at 8:17 AM, Wilczan said:

Merging - yes

Making home serwers pve - no

 

I don't understand why the objection to moving Epic home servers to PVE ? Especially when many Elevation hardcore PvP players have objected to the 'Freedumbers' all along, and wanted nothing more than having them closed or just gone.

 

Well moving the home servers to a small, isolated PVE cluster does exactly that, but preserves the servers, and those who wish to remain living on them, rather than forcing them onto Chaos and losing servers they have been on a long time, with all the resentment and dissatisfaction that entails, Perhaps make them 'hardcore PvE, Keep the Valrei creatures already there, and enable their continued spawning over time, I'm sure there's a niche for a more dangerous server or two in Wurm's repertoire, the present 'wreckage of civilisation' aspect that the ruins and remains of former deeds just add to the post apocalyptic feel anyway.

 

I understand that PVE is not what some people want, they want PvP, they want it fixed, but everyone has different views of what constitutes 'fixed'.

 

Epic does not have to be shut down because the PvP aspect is perceived as broken, or unsatisfying, I see no need to scrap perfectly good servers, Epic has already cost CCAB a lot of man hours of design and implementation, I for one would hate to see all that scrapped, but the present low point in population and interest in Epic PvP cannot be sustained in the long term, so a way to 'save' the servers we have might be to simply reuse the Epic concept in a different way.

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The server is dead. If devs at this point an update to w/e mechanic epic has, is gonna revive that, then yeah. 

My hopes for Epic is dead I have zero interest for Epic because of X amount of reasons

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Make Valrei great again and that will solve all of epics issues.

 

Said no one ever.

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Close epic and focus on the important things.

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Move Valrei to freedom, give the tier rewards to Chaos, allowing us to complete more competeitve missions for tomes, make these tomes untradable. Only ones from Uniques will be tradable. 
 

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17 hours ago, Zenity said:

/snip

Epic does not have to be shut down because the PvP aspect is perceived as broken, or unsatisfying, I see no need to scrap perfectly good servers, Epic has already cost CCAB a lot of man hours of design and implementation, I for one would hate to see all that scrapped, but the present low point in population and interest in Epic PvP cannot be sustained in the long term, so a way to 'save' the servers we have might be to simply reuse the Epic concept in a different way.

 

No reason to close them for sure right now(although, in very long run its only sensible thing to do).

 

But about reworking epic.. is there anyone from the devs, who thinks, that Epic can be revived? Personally I doubt it, as even die hard Epic players don't believe that any more. So why dump even more hours into lost cause. At current state the service should be kept as is, with no more support(updates etc).. This lets the team focus on one thing.

 

In current state it would make sense to move Valrei features into Chaos server, which would encourage even the remaining Epic players to move to Chaos(instead of current goal, try to split up the pvp playerbase once again). This would also mean, that Epic player-gods, who don't techincally have anything to do with Freedom cluster, can be removed. But Valrei features on Chaos means, that there players from our own cluster have a chance to ascend.

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18 hours ago, Zenity said:

 

I don't understand why the objection to moving Epic home servers to PVE ? Especially when many Elevation hardcore PvP players have objected to the 'Freedumbers' all along, and wanted nothing more than having them closed or just gone.

 

Well moving the home servers to a small, isolated PVE cluster does exactly that, but preserves the servers, and those who wish to remain living on them, rather than forcing them onto Chaos and losing servers they have been on a long time, with all the resentment and dissatisfaction that entails, Perhaps make them 'hardcore PvE, Keep the Valrei creatures already there, and enable their continued spawning over time, I'm sure there's a niche for a more dangerous server or two in Wurm's repertoire, the present 'wreckage of civilisation' aspect that the ruins and remains of former deeds just add to the post apocalyptic feel anyway.

 

I understand that PVE is not what some people want, they want PvP, they want it fixed, but everyone has different views of what constitutes 'fixed'.

 

Epic does not have to be shut down because the PvP aspect is perceived as broken, or unsatisfying, I see no need to scrap perfectly good servers, Epic has already cost CCAB a lot of man hours of design and implementation, I for one would hate to see all that scrapped, but the present low point in population and interest in Epic PvP cannot be sustained in the long term, so a way to 'save' the servers we have might be to simply reuse the Epic concept in a different way.

 

Have to agree that there isn't much value in just shutting down Epic servers at the moment.  I would imagine the cost of upkeep for CCAB is nominal in the grander scheme of things.

Also agree there's a market for more challenging PvE environments.  Some of the WU servers that provide that are doing well for themselves.  Having the Epic timers and curve, a pve environment providing adventures worthy of being "epic," and the chance to just enjoy time in Wurm without worrying about everything being destroyed when too tired to do much else may well be attractive.  Particularly to people who already have premium accounts on the Freedom side of things.

 

Having PvE servers included in Epic may not provide more deeds to drain/destroy while the owners are offline, but it may provide more people willing to join the fighting on the central PvP servers when they are online.

The PvE servers can also have limitations that differentiate them from Freedom servers, such as deeds of limited size, vastly increased space between deeds, etc.  That would ensure a lot of wild areas to keep the creature spawn up, and distributed.

 

Food for thought may be PvP anywhere outside deeds, but safe deeds themselves (on Epic-style PvE servers).  Not sure how fond I am of that personally, but it does have benefits.  Just something to think about.

 

Even Valhalla(the actual one, not the wurm one :P), arguably the most bad-arsed place reserved for the most bad-arsed warriors, has a PvE environment full of mead, meat off the bone, and Valkyries to retire to after the daily carnage.  There's no shame in providing that on Epic, I think.

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I hope new server on epic locks you at 30 body str max when on starting islands, so you move to ele.

Any person going back to starter island, is nerfed down to 30 body again, that way the pvp is atleast fair for newer players. 

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No idea what the financials look like; however, the company may be fine with keeping Epic maps online. There certainly is more coin in game than even a year ago, so at least someone is buying more. Not to mention less players does allow for scaling back on operating costs for specific maps.

 

Personally if Epic has to go, I'm fine personally with getting nothing; though, I did play Epic quite a bit during its first two years with the faster skillgain and stuff squirreled away. Certainly not bothering to maintain a deed.

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Closing servers isn't only a financial decision. For example(just random numbers to show what I mean), when game has 1000 players, who are spread out between 10 servers.. That makes 100 players per server, which is means it can take a while to find someone. When game has 1 server for all 1000 players, it means populaion is 10 times denser and there are more people to play with.

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3 hours ago, rixk said:

Closing servers isn't only a financial decision. For example(just random numbers to show what I mean), when game has 1000 players, who are spread out between 10 servers.. That makes 100 players per server, which is means it can take a while to find someone. When game has 1 server for all 1000 players, it means populaion is 10 times denser and there are more people to play with.

 

And what of those players that would prefer not to live in such proximity? Seems to me that people who want to live near each other... would live near each other. Such people do tend to gravitate and seek out others.

 

Closing servers to FORCE people to be near each other seems hardly conducive to the intent of keeping people ingame.

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